It’s time to get this Fite going: An idealist and a total bastard facing off on a stretch of blood-stained ground. Well, it would be bloodstained if I hadn’t spent all night scrubbing it down and setting up a strip.
Cue the music.
Alex the Janitor versus Jaxx Tantra
VS
CAPTIONS PROVIDED BY CAMERA THUG #3, due to his having beheaded the other camera thugs. All Fite footage will be available in Betamax.
Alex shifts his weight back and forth, letting the tip of Excalibur weave slowly in the air. The lights catch on the ancient hammered bronze, sliding along the spiral engravings like oil, and the weight of the scabbard at his hip reassures him. Sarah is somewhere in the audience, but Alex won’t make the mistake of taking his eyes off of the ex-sentinel. Jaxx has barely moved, settling down onto the ground.
A blur. Alex is knocked sideways with incredible force, yet Tantra still hasn’t moved, except to stub out his cigarette on his palm.
Another blow, and the janitor is slammed sideways, tasting blood.
Blow after blow strike his armor, his head, and even the ground around Alex, like a cloud of gnats as heavy as lead bars. He drops to his knees, leaning on Excalibur, and forces a screen of magic up around him. The hammering continues, eased enough for him to hear a cruel, clear sound.
Jaxx is laughing.
“Is that the best you can do, really? I’m practically pulling my punches over here. Because that,” says Jaxx, as the knight reels under the barrage, “is how the world works. I do whatever the fuck I want, and even I’m screwed over half the time. I have the power, and you know what I do with it?
“I make people scream. Someone gets in my way, I snap them in half. I exsanguinate them. Occasionally, I pull their skin off. You know what the worst part of that is, getting your skin pulled off? The more sensitive members of the audience may want to cover their ears, by the way.” His voice drops to a hissing stage whisper, over which the meat-hammer thuds of his telekinetic attacks can be heard clearly. “The worst part is, well, once you get started... It’s not the blood, though that’ll be everywhere. And it’s not the pain. It’s not even the way the skin’ll resist for just a second, clinging to the flesh, before it starts to peel off. No, it’s the way it feels, under the pain. Exposed, naked, left out in the cruel bastard world. Like you, right now. I’ve killed more people than you’ve met. More people than live on this little planet. This was barely worth my time. I just thought a lesson would do you good.
Heroes lose. Eventually, they get broken. Do yourself a favor, kid, you and that robe full of sugar, give-
Alex has had enough, and, like a flash – or rather, a fleche – crosses the strip, Excalibur plunging into the ex-sentinel’s shoulder, slamming into bone with the sound of a sharpened I-beam smashing three-hundred-year-old marsh oak. Jaxx reels, countering with a flurry of superhuman blows, but the knight is a master swordsman, dancing out of reach only to bring his holy blade in again and again. Jaxx’s chest is quickly patterned with long, shallow cuts and vicious nicks, and his greatcoat perforated and slitted. He spins, bringing his arm around in a vicious arc, only to receive a slash across the chest. He blocks, feeling a chip of bone taken off his forearm, and lashes out, his fist again passing through air. He grins.
The fite’s getting fun.
In a flash of blue light, Jaxx is gone, appearing behind and to the right of the knight. Before the screaming audience’s heads can turn, he shoots forward like a Black Mamba on five thousand volts, thrusting a knifehand strike into Alex’s barely-armored torso. Alex, for his part, registered the teleportation within microseconds, and manages to bring his sword around, clipping the ex-sentinel as the janitor is flung backwards, barely managing to turn a mad tumble into a long skidding crouch. Jaxx looks at his hand, which by rights should be covered in the knight’s intestines. There’s blood on the knuckles, and Jaxx can feel blood soaking into his every article of clothing, but it’s all his, but for the merest spattering. A quick once-over of his opponent reveals the cause: The Scabbard of Excalibur. Jaxx curses. The scabbard is at least as great an artifact as the sword; no enemy can spill the wearer’s blood. What should have gone through human skin like a howitzer shell through a pile of tapirs had bounced off. He could see the massive bruise through Alex’s ripped shirt, and if he was lucky internal bleeding wasn’t stopped by the Scabbard, but this was ridiculous. Time for... improvisation.
Alex can barely see Jaxx as he blasts across the arena, but Excalibur is so light it almost feels as though it pulls his hands into position. He strikes low, running red furrows into Jaxx’s legs, then flicks his sword out, knocking aside a super-powered fist so that it flashes past Alex’s head a mere handful of inches away. The sonic boom of its passage stings. Jaxx, for his part, pulls back, left fist raised for a massive haymaker. Alex brings Excalibur up, bracing the blade to block the strike...
And Jaxx’s fist passes right through the ancient bronze. Alex bounces along the packed dirt, feeling his broken ribs, nose, and assorted other parts with each bounce, and the handle of the legendary sword of Arthur slips from his grasp. Jaxx is beside him instantly, picking it up. The sword is dull, its legendary luster dim. Something in the ex-sentinel’s left hand shines like song and starlight. He holds it up to his face, and grins evilly.
“Know what this is, Alex?” He tosses the glowing thing onto the ground, and steps on it. “It’s the soul of Excalibur. A weapon like that is practically alive, and you have no idea how much I enjoyed punching that out.”
He lifts the dead Excalibur into the air over the fallen janitor, who raises his hand to bring to bear a thin shield of energy. Jaxx ignores it, and stabs down. The sword rebounds right out of his hand.
“Right. The scabbard. Well, I suppose this’ll have to happen the slow way, eh?” Jaxx puts his booted foot on Alex’s chest, and leans down.
After a few seconds, Alex’s ribcage begins to creak. He can feel the pressure not just in his chest but throughout his body, as though his veins were filling with fire.
“Stop... or...” he manages.
“Oh, I don’t think so. Your heart hasn’t popped yet. Y’see, the heart’s a fucking useless organ, really. It’s got no power to change things. You may have determination, heroism, fuck, you even have a girl on the sidelines cheering for you. But now you’re going to die, because heroics don’t change a goddamn thing. Learn a bit of realpolitik, and die in agony.” He presses down, hard.
The arena is silent. The crowd are used to brutality, but this is a whole other world of hurt than the one regularly visited upon everyone involved.
When Alex finally dies, shuddering, Jaxx straightens up. For some reason the crowd are focusing on his ankles. He looks down, confused.
A glowing mist is beginning to fill the arena...
The soul of Excalibur, a holy sword, is pure White Magic. Now, normally, white magic isn’t particularly terrifying to anything but the undead. White magic is all about love, and hope, and the heroic spirit and other pretty terms that you’d think were restricted to poets. Not even the dangerous Norse kind, but normal poets.
What people tend to forget, when they see love compared to ‘Rosy-fingered Dawn’ or hope to a candle flame, is that one candle can turn Chicago into an inferno, and dawn is the sun, a ball of plasma larger and hotter than the human mind can really comprehend, coming over the horizon. In short, it may look beautiful and pretty and harmless, but that’s only with millions of miles of distance.
Currently, the sun is rising a few inches of Alex’s optical nerve from the outside world, and Jaxx can barely see for the glare. His fists tighten. The corpse-sword of Excalibur buzzes, resonating with the energies pouring through the arena. In the stands, minds flood with heat and light, old wounds cease to ache for a moment, and a few people spontaneously develop the need to open a roller-disco. Also, extreme sunburn.
Meanwhile, Alex rises. He seems to come into focus, for the first time, suddenly razor-sharp against a muddied and unclear world. The spiral patterns from the sword crawl across his skin, and drift around him in the air. The knight laughs, and the clear, silver peal is more terrible than any mad chuckle or villainous cackle.
A handy tip: Do Not Fuck With Good-Aligned Undead. Ever. White fire blossoms around the knight, who draws a sword from Excalibur’s empty sheath and raises it to the sky, drawing magical energies in from every direction. It’s not another Excalibur, or Gram or Kusanagi or any other blade of legends. This sword predated all of them, in a way: this is the Ur-Sword, the burning inspiration that drove Wayland and Masamune, the flickering blade swordsmiths futilely try to bring into the world in metal, the sword of which the corpse of Excalibur is but a material shadow.
Within the unfolding spaces of Excalibur’s power, one can see Alex’s supporters, literally powering the walking corpse of the knight as Excalibur maintains a gash in the border between life and death. But among them, one stands out. A stranger, rendered in transparent flesh and luminous bone, that brings a black rage to Jaxx’s twisted features.
“You fucker. That’s my wife.”
An aside: The referee has decided that, while Alex DID technically die, he was at least not totally dead, only mostly dead, clinging to life via sheer determination. Citing “The Princess Bride,” Gezora has stated that this means that his in-fight symbiosis with his sword’s vital force is "STRANGE AND PROBABLY UNHYGIENIC BUT LEGAL."
The two fighters barely wait a moment to go at it again, moving with a blurring speed. Jaxx feints left and strikes right, but Alex - Alexcalibur? - deftly weaves out of the way, ducking under the blow to swing out with his ideal sword, reversing it instantly as Jaxx brings down his shoulder to trap it; this conceptual ‘sword’ clearly is not bound by the normal laws of inertia. Tantra teleports mid-punch, appearing directly behind Alex, but the janitor deflects the brutal blow with his pauldron, which crumples instantly, and brings the blade around in an upward arc that Jaxx narrowly avoids. Having just dodged bisection, Jaxx claps his hands onto the flat of the blade and forces it aside, throwing Alex forward into a rising knee with an audible crunch. Alex rolls over this, barely losing a moment as he spins to his feet, twisting the sword out of the ex-sentinel’s hands in a red spray. Jaxx ducks back as the blade darts forward, barely saving his left eye, and teleports across the arena. Before he can concentrate on a psychic barrage, however, Alex rockets forward. The knight is trailing a raging cloud of white fire, as every inch of his skin churns with energy, and the sword’s tip describes a crazed labyrinth of a strike past Jaxx’s guard. Or, it would, if there was any guard at all. Instead, Jaxx stands his ground and strikes out as the memory of a sword cuts into him, lifting Alexcalibur off his feet into a spin with a massive blow to the shoulder. The compound crack of bones being pulverized shocks the crowd, and the blood-dripping Tantra stalks forward towards his foe, who pulls himself upright fast, but not with the lightning speed he’s been displaying. Jaxx throws a hand forward, onto the sword, and pulls it aside, bone grinding against immaculate blade. With his other hand he hammers the knight’s face, faster than the eye can follow, once, twice, three times before he can pull away and bring his sword around to cut across Jaxx’s forehead, blinding the ex-sentinel long enough for him to regain his footing.
The white fire flowing out of Alex is dimming. The massive energies of Excalibur are boiling away, and his sword is visibly flickering, and there’s no way Alex could support his ruined body without it. For his part, Jaxx is beginning to feel the blood loss and searing pain his adrenaline has been lying to him about for most of the fight.
The two face each other, stances loose. Alex’s face is hidden in blinding white fire that contains reflections of his supporters. Tantra’s is merely red with blood and tilted forward. Then, as though at some unheard signal, the two combatants lunge forward, wreathed in holy fire and psychokinetic fields. One waver, one wrong move, and -
...
Jaxx, meanwhile, is in the process of dying. It’s nothing new to him, but there’s something that is. He’d let himself be distracted, and impaled, but he could have sworn she had said something to him, from out of the fire. “You cannot be redeemed...” but there was something after that. “But you can become who you once were, and that Jaxx...
Can.”
Jaxx Tantra dies, wondering if you can even trust a ghost to be who it looks like.
...
Later, at the King of Beasts, intensive renovations are underway. It appears that the energy released by Excalibur had influenced the referee himself...
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